On Tuesday 16 December 2003 18:32, john gennard wrote: > On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 07:56:46AM +0100, Dirk Heinrichs wrote: > > > May be I should go back and manually compile a kernel - I've normally > > > no problem in doing that and I generally include everything I need, > > > leaving only three modules. > > > > Hmm, maybe the best thing to do. Anyway, I wonder why you would want to > > boot from floppy? > > As I said when first posting, I'm old (well into my 70s), and started > with no knowledge of computing. I have (to keep the peace here) to allow > a Win installation on the hard drive, and I've long learned not to > trust it - (in fact I hardly ever use it), so I don't want any problems > with the MBR. Using lilo on a floppy suits me fine - I can fire up any > one of 5 o/s (3 varieties of Debian) and would like to have Gentoo > around as it looks very good to this novice. I understand what you > say, but Linux has much to do with choice and so if I'm content I'd > rather not change unless there are compelling reasons to do so.
In the original install guide, there was a small section about creating boot disks which doesn't seem to be in the new handbook. Anyway, for lilo it said to do the following. However, the following doesn't include kernel options nor the installation of lilo so I don't know if it would actually work. # dd if=/boot/your_kernel of=/dev/fd0 I would think that lilo with a config similar to what follows should work. To use it. I'm using grub, though, so I can't check to see if it would work or not. Also, I don't actually own a floppy disk. ;-) boot=/dev/fd0 image=/kernel label=gentoo read-only root=/dev/<root> To use the above config, you would need to: # mke2fs /dev/fd0 # mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy # cp /path/to/kernel /mnt/floppy # umount /mnt/floppy # lilo Regardless of Windows version, you shouldn't be required to use a boot floppy, though. The worst that could happen is that Windows overwrites your mbr. In that case, you could just boot a livecd, chroot to whichever distro manages your mbr and then reinstall the boot sector. -- Regards, Jason Stubbs -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
